HP announced last week that it had signed a new 6-year $800 million agreement with travel giant, Sabre Holdings. The contract includes IT outsourcing services, applications management, storage and networking.

HP and Sabre are hardly strangers, as the new deal with build on top of a long standing relationship between HP and Sabre.

"HP has had a relationship with Sabre for 11 years and this relationship has continued to grow," Russ Krauss, vice president and chief of staff at HP Enterprise Services, told InternetNews.com. "HP is uniquely positioned to help identify Sabre’s infrastructure needs and with this new agreement, we have added HP Networking and 3 Par storage in order to help Sabre continue its successful transformation journey.

From a networking perspective, HP Networking will help to enable Sabre's infrastructure in a number of different ways. HP networking gear is a key component in the convergence and virtualization of the HP Blade Systems that will enable Sabre to continue providing innovative products for the travel industry.

"For Sabre to keep up with customer demands like new applications and services they need a datacenter that can adapt to changing market conditions," Krauss said. "HP Networking solutions will enable Sabre to achieve increased IT efficiently and agility, while lowering total cost of ownership."